SMURF Philosophy

The name and the philosophy of SMURF are heavily influenced by the SMACSS approach by Jonathan Snook (@snookca) which stands for Scalable Modular Architecture for CSS.

These are the main goals behind SMURF:

Goal 1: Conventions

Analogous to what SMACSS does for modular CSS we want to establish conventions for naming, structure, and filenames of all modular frontend code. There should be a specific partial, helper or similar for each frontend module and it should be immediately clear how it needs to be named and where the files should be put.

This goal is achieved when it is completely clear where all the necessary parts of a frontend module are located.

Goal 2: Living Styleguide

Based on the conventions from Goal 1 we are creating tools that parse our Rails projects and render anything that makes sense into a living styleguide. This would include an overview of all the modules with their different submodules and states and hopefully also some JS interactions. The two goals behind this would be a) to have a tool for something like "visual unit testing" and b) to have a communication device for any kind of design work within a project.

As a first step, our SMURF gem can already render a living styleguide of all the color variables in your Sass code.